Can world be living off US, or is it the other way around?

TIME and time again US president Trump would blame the rest of the world for his own incompetence, repeating consistently that the United States assists the rest of the world in a number of different ways, therefore he believes that everyone should listen to Washington’s instructions and follow them without demur.During his inaugural speech Trump would announce boldly that ‘America has made other countries rich, while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated.’It’s been noted that by using economic blackmail and intimidation, Trump has signed a number of deals within the first year of his presidency, along with an order to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, while pledging to renegotiate NAFTA and preparing a moratorium on new multilateral agreements. He directed construction of a wall along the southern border and threatened a 20 per cent import tax on goods from Mexico. And he blocked refugees, immigrants and travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries.Recent threats to deprive states opposed to Washington’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel of US financial support fall into the same pattern of policy over economic cooperation that the Trump administration has been pursuing from day one. In his constant attempts to intimidate other states, Trump would go as far as saying the following on the eve of the UN General Assembly vote:‘All these nations that take our money and then vote against us at the Security Council or the assembly, they take hundreds of millions of dollars and billions of dollars and they vote against us. Well, we’re watching those votes. Let them vote against us, we’ll save a lot. We don’t care.’However, the contrast between Trump’s rhetoric and the actual state of affairs in the world couldn’t be more evident to those following international politics, as it’s not the world that is robbing the US, as a matter of fact it’s been the other way around for over a century now.The US has a track record of addressing its own problems by plundering other economies. Ukraine, which Washington has sucked dry cannot satisfy its capitalist hunger. Who else should be feeling uneasy about its future then? Neither Venezuela, nor Syria, nor even Iran can provide enough resources to support the US economy. At the same time, Washington is not willing to risk any attempt to plunder China.We must not forget that the better part of American dollars circulate outside the United States. Therefore, when things begin looking grim for Washington it starts printing money thus devaluing the dollars that the rest of the world is using. This simple scheme allows America to rob other states, which are forced to use cheap dollars under the threat of American military might or ‘colour revolutions’.In order to buy food, clothes or gadgets one has to extract hydrocarbons or produce products and sell those to get some cash. In other words, people in other states are bound to spend a lot of their time and energy to produce some value. In the US, to get the same result one simply has to push the ‘print’ button somewhere within the Federal Reserve. Then everyone sells their products to the United States and the rest of the world in dollars. This is an endless cycle of getting money out of thin air devised by Washington.When the number of worthless pieces of green paper circulating across the world approaches a critical mass, Washington would invent a system to recycle those by borrowing dollars from all over the world, by buying dollars with US Treasury bonds. The number of these bonds accumulated by all the states of the world amounts to the size of the US national debt, which currently exceeds 20 trillion dollars, according to a recently built electronic billboard near Times Square in downtown Manhattan. That is how America has been living relatively carefree while selling worthless pieces of paper to the rest of the world, thus abusing the hard labour of people across the planet, while unleashing wars and selling weapons used to fight them.By why would anybody would want to buy American dollars and treasury bonds if they are aware that they are worthless? The answer is simple: Washington has been doing everything it can to make other assets look risky or uninteresting for investors by making them unstable. The quest to save the dollar is a quest for constant war or destabilisation, that can only be achieved through constant chaos and revolutions.For those pieces of green paper that the Federal Reserve is printing, Washington is hiring poor beggars all over the world that are desperate enough to risk their lives for a few dollars a day, for example, by combating the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria or any other leader across the world. That’s what a proxy war is, as there are a lot of desperate people across the globe.But Washington has ways of achieving stated goals in other states without waging wars on those as well. It is enough to send a fair amount of ‘American advisers’ to targeted states to revise the laws there, some of which are designed to obstruct economic development, while others will hinder the scientific and technical potential of its people.But there’s a handful of examples of Washington robbing its victims directly. A striking example of such crimes was the claim that Nigerian authorities made in 2016, regarding the loss of 12.7 billion dollars in oil revenue between 2011 and 2014. The world has long been accustomed to the fact that the majority of financial scams of this magnitude often is some way or another are connected to Washington, as it was the case that time. After an investigation, the Nigerian government accused the world’s largest oil companies of illegally exporting oil to the United States for a total of 12.7 billion dollars. The Lagos Federal Court registered law suits against such companies as Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, Agip, and Total. Sources in the government of Nigeria report that those companies managed to smuggle more than 57 million barrels of oil to the US. These facts were established after an audit of the declared volumes of oil exports from Nigeria itself and comparison with the volumes that were received in the United States.That is why it doesn’t take a genius to show that it’s not the world that has been living off the US, as Trump wants us to believe, but the other way around. In fact, Washington has devised quite a number of financial schemes to avoid hard work in obtaining its vast wealth.

New Eastern Outlook, January 5. Martin Berger is a freelance journalist and geopolitical analyst.